Better Call Saul Isn't Just Another Antihero Story

Last night's Season Two finale of AMC's Better Call Saul began, like so many great episodes of Vince Gilligan series, with a breathtaking cold open. Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), the scrappy lawyer who will become Breaking Bad's flamboyantly extralegal Saul Goodman, sits in his unconscious mother's hospital room with his older brother, big-shot Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill partner Chuck (Michael McKean). Jimmy goes out to buy a sandwich. Chuck dissolves into tears. Suddenly, their mother is calling Jimmy's name. And then she's dead. When Jimmy returns, he asks if she woke up and said anything. Chuck says, "No."

It's a brilliant scene, thanks in part to the way Gilligan uses the flashback to build suspense. The season's penultimate episode ended with Chuck falling, bumping his head, and passing out in a copy shop, on a quest to prove Jimmy sabotaged his legal documents. By jumping back in time, Better Call Saul delayed any revelations about Chuck's head injury while suggesting a thematic connection between his fate and the death of the McGill brothers' mom.

But ultimately, Chuck survives his fall. In the final scenes of the season, he returns home and quits HHM—a calculated move that forces Jimmy into confessing to the same sabotage Chuck hurt himself trying to prove. Although Chuck suffers from the controversial affliction electromagnetic hypersensitivity and has banished all electronic devices from his home, he manages to capture Jimmy's admission of guilt on a hidden tape recorder. It's here that the true link between the flashback and the present situation reveals itself: in both cases, Chuck deceives Jimmy out of some sense that he is restoring justice to a universe that unjustly rewards Jimmy for his happy-go-lucky recklessness. And in both cases, Jimmy's inability to fathom the depths of his brother's malice hurts him in ways he can't even recognize.

Gilligan, who directed and co-wrote the episode, leaves us with a handful of questions. Who should have our sympathy—Jimmy, whose brash but not malicious actions nearly get his brother killed, or Chuck, whose deception is just the latest move in an ongoing quest to ruin Jimmy's career? Does preying on Jimmy's concern for him make Chuck a villain, or has Chuck suffered enough at Jimmy's unwitting hands that his cruelty is justified? Is Jimmy's seemingly inevitable downfall his fault or Chuck's?

No resolution could be more appropriate for a season of Better Call Saul. When it premiered, the show promised an origin story for a character who often served as Breaking Bad's comic relief—a sideshow to antihero Walter White's descent into evil. But instead of just wringing more laughs out of Saul Goodman's outsize presence, Better Call Saul has spent the past two seasons positioning him as the central figure in a complex moral universe, full of characters who muddy all preconceived notions of right and wrong.

AMC

When we meet Jimmy McGill in the series premiere, he's barely scraping by on a public defender's salary. Though his heart is in the right place and his garrulousness is endearing, he can't help breaking rules that don't make sense to him. His brother Chuck couldn't be more different. He's a powerful, widely respected attorney obsessed with the letter of the law, but his terror of the messy real world has metastasized into a debilitating, apparently psychosomatic illness. Initially painted as a principled hypochondriac, Chuck slowly reveals himself to be Jimmy's opposite on one more count: his heart isn't in the right place. Before Better Call Saul's first season is over, it comes out that Chuck blocked HHM from hiring his brother because he resented Jimmy for passing the bar without going to law school. In a way, that makes him responsible for all the desperate, ill-advised things Jimmy does to survive.

It's the contrast between Jimmy and Chuck that not only drives Better Call Saul's richest conflicts, but poses its stickiest dilemmas. What makes a good person: adherence to society's rules or authentically positive intentions? What makes a bad person: malice or transgression? Are all actions that don't violate a law—like manipulating your brother into giving a taped confession—morally justified? Or is it OK to break rules to correct a genuinely unfair situation?

Although neither represents an extreme of good or evil, the McGill brothers fall on opposite sides of these particular ethical questions. It's the characters that surround them, each guided by their own worldview and haunted by their own choices, who lend additional complexity to Better Call Saul's moral universe. Chuck's slick younger partner, Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), seems at first to be a smug, petty corporate drone. Towards the end of Season Two, however, he confesses to harboring regrets over playing it safe and joining his father's firm. Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) is a gangster, but not a sadist like some of his colleagues. And Jimmy's former and future associate Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) only participates in the criminal underworld to support his daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Driven by guilt over his son's death, he goes out of his way not to cause unnecessary violence but loses control when someone hurts or even threatens his family.

If Mike was last season's most fascinating character, this season's is Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn). Jimmy's on-again, off-again girlfriend, Kim rose from HHM's mailroom to become one of its superstar attorneys. In the office, she's all professionalism. Off the clock, she's drawn to Jimmy's rebelliousness. Their favorite thing to do together is con cocky men into picking up their astronomical bar tabs.

Kim wants to believe she can keep her work and Jimmy separate, but he's a force she can't control. His mistakes get her banished to document review, so she quits HHM—and turns down a job at another big firm—to start her own practice. In a decision whose symbolism is clear, she agrees to share an office space but not a practice with Jimmy. That doesn't stop him from interfering with her business; it's in a well-intentioned attempt to win over clients he believes are rightfully Kim's that Jimmy sabotages Chuck. Now that Chuck has Jimmy's confession, she could lose her entire career. Like a combination of Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman and Skyler White, Kim is both the most relatable and the most vulnerable character on Better Call Saul.

AMC

Torn as she is between Jimmy's and Chuck's worldviews, it makes sense that Kim understands their relationship better than anyone. "I know he cuts corners, but you're the one who made him this way," Kim told Chuck last week. "He idolizes you. He accepts you. He takes care of you. And all he ever wanted was your love, and support. But all you've ever done is judge him. You never believed in him. You never wanted him to succeed. And you know what? I feel sorry for him. And I feel sorry for you." There are no heroes or villains here, just three people whose conflicting ideas of how to live a good life doom them to making each other miserable.

It's no coincidence that all of these characters are lawyers—a profession that's charged with both defending and manipulating the laws that govern society, regardless of whether those laws are right or wrong. Because what makes Better Call Saul more than just another antihero story (see: this year's most conspicuous prestige flop,Vinyl) is that it isn't primarily interested in tracing one troubled protagonist's path from good to bad or bad to good. Along with FX's Fargo, which raises similar questions, Better Call Saul points the way to a new sort of TV drama—one that takes flawed characters as a given, but uses those flaws to challenge our assumptions about what "good" and "bad" even mean.

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